A Science News Aggregator That Covers Stories in the World Of Science And Technology.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Apec Leaders Drop Climate Target
World leaders meeting in Singapore have said it will not be possible to reach a climate change deal ahead of next month's UN conference in Denmark.
After a two-day Asia-Pacific summit, they vowed to work towards an "ambitious outcome" in Copenhagen.
But the group dropped a target to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which was outlined in an earlier draft.
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
Army Corps of Engineers Now Required to Consider Climate Change in All Future Projects
From Popular Science:
Worst-case planning never hurt anybody, and certainly not federal water projects that cost millions of dollars and could be easily undone by climate change and rising sea levels. A new policy now requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to plan for future climate change when designing plans for flood control or other projects.
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Can Alternative Energy Save The Economy And The Climate?
From Scientific American:
The "new energy" economy rolls forward even as hopes for an international deal to combat climate change at Copenhagen shift into reverse.
BRIGHTON, Colo. - The low-carbon economy has already arrived on the windy prairie north of this fast-growing Denver 'burb. It's here that Danish wind-turbine giant Vestas converted 298 acres of hayfield into the West's largest turbine factory - and turned Brighton into a magnet for "green" energy companies.
It's part of a $1 billion investment by the company in the United States, what Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter touts as a "new energy economy."
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Watch A 2006 Bugatti Veyron Crash On Video
Facebook video of a 2006 Bugatti Veyron crash shows the car making a wall of water as it hits a Texas lagoon. No one was injured in the crash.
It’s one of the rarest cars on the road, and Galveston, Tex. medical school student Joe Garza saw it crash on his way to get groceries.
He and a friend were driving off of Galveston Island when they pulled up alongside the $2 million French supercar, believed to be one of just 15 in the US. When they pulled up to the sporty two-seater, Garza whipped out his camera and started shooting. That’s when the unthinkable happened.
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Cocaine And Pepper Spray – A Lethal Mix?
From New Scientist:
DEATHS in US police custody during the early 1990s may have been the result of an interaction between capsaicin, the key ingredient in pepper sprays, and psychostimulant drugs, an experiment in mice suggests.
If the two have a fatal interaction in people then police forces might have to rethink their use of pepper spray as a non-lethal weapon, says John Mendelson of the Addiction and Pharmacology Research Laboratory at St Luke's Hospital in San Francisco, who led the mouse research.
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El Niño Gaining Strength
From Watts Up With That?
From the “WUWT never reports on anything warm department”, JPL reports El Niño looks like it is on schedule to make a Christmas appearance as “The Boy”. The good news is that it will likely help California’s water situation this year.
From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
El Niño is experiencing a late-fall resurgence. Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/French Space Agency Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite show that a large-scale, sustained weakening of trade winds in the western and central equatorial Pacific during October has triggered a strong, eastward-moving wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave.
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Google's Replacement for HTTP Protocol To Make Web Browsing Twice As Fast
From Popular Science:
The proposed rewrite of the web's backbone comes with both benefits and caveats.
Google has scarcely stopped for a breather since launching its cloud-based Chrome OS as an alternative to PC and Mac operating systems. Now its Chromium group has announced an effort to replace the traditional HTTP web browser language with a new protocol that supposedly boosts Internet browsing by up to 55 percent.
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Rat Made Supersmart -- Similar Boost Unsafe in Humans?
From National Geographic:
By modifying a single gene, scientists have made Hobbie-J the smartest rat in the world, a new study says.
A similar gene tweak might boost human brainpower too, but scientists warn that there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good.
For years scientifically smartened rats have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algernon and The Secret of NIMH. But Hobbie-J is anything but fiction.
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The 10 Weirdest Physics Facts, From Relativity To Quantum Physics
From The Telegraph:
People who think science is dull are wrong. Here are 10 reasons why.
Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box.
We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users.
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Dinosaur Discovered In South Africa... And May Reveal How They Grew To Be So Big
From The Daily Mail:
A new dinosaur named the 'Earth Claw' has been discovered in South Africa.
The discovery of the Aardonyx celestae marks a breakthrough in understanding how creatures began walking on all fours - and why they grew so large, scientists claimed yesterday.
Researchers believe the near-perfect skeleton bridges the gap between the earliest two-legged specimens and those who later walked on four limbs.
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Friday, November 13, 2009
Two Earth-sized Bodies With Oxygen Rich Atmospheres Found, But They're Stars Not Planets
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two earth sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres -- however there is a bit of a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves, as they are not planets but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars.
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Humans Still Evolving As Our Brains Shrink
From Live Science:
Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.
Shrinking brains
Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.
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Medpedia To Best The More Democratic Wikipedia?
From CNET News:
Medpedia, a collaborative project for medical information launched in February, is getting beyond the medical-data basics as it adds answers, alerts, and analysis.
Founded on the noble and semipractical system of providing free online medical information generated for and by physicians, journals, schools, patients, and more, Medpedia's three stated goals are to be collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transparent. The idea is to maximize knowledge and minimize the kind of screwing around that continually threatens the efficacy of other wiki-based projects. Of course, the extent to which this is successful hinges on the quality, integrity, and transparency of the editors.
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Quantum 'Trampoline' To Test Gravity
IT'S the world's smallest trampoline. Bouncing atoms with lasers could make ultra-precise measurements of gravity.
To test theories such as general relativity, the strength of gravity is measured precisely using ensembles of supercold atoms falling in a vacuum chamber. These ensembles are called "Bose-Einstein condensates".
How The Brain Hard-Wires Us To Love Google, Twitter, And Texting. And Why That's Dangerous.
Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."
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National Security Agency's Surveillance Data Could Fill Two States by 2015
From Popular Science:
Where will the NSA house its secret yottabytes?
We always knew that the National Security Agency collects a lot of surveillance data from satellites and by other means, but we never quite imagined it was this much: the NSA estimates it will have enough data by 2015 to fill a million datacenters spread across the equivalent combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island. The NSA wants to store yottabytes of data, and one yottabyte comes to 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.
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Friday The 13th Superstitions Get Rare Workout In 2009
From National Geographic:
Today, Friday the 13th superstitions are fraying nerves for the third time in 2009.
Luckily for paraskevidekatriaphobics—people who harbor Friday the 13th superstitions—three Friday the 13ths are the yearly maximum, at least as long as we continue to mark time with the Gregorian calendar, which Pope Gregory XIII ordered the Catholic Church to adopt in 1582.
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Pursuit Of Pleasure Drives Human Decisions
From The Telegraph:
The pursuit of pleasure drives the everyday decisions that direct people's lives, research suggests.
Scientists discovered that a reward chemical in the brain plays a key role in choices such as where to go on holiday.
They believe the ''pleasure principle'' may be at the heart of most human decision making.
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There Is More Water On The Moon Than What We Thought
There is water on the moon, NASA confirmed today, and lots of it.
In the first look at results from the LCROSS mission, which sent a probe crashing into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole, NASA’s main investigator said their instruments clearly detected water, despite the underwhelming plume.
Within the field of view of their instruments, the team measured approximately 220 pounds or about 26 gallons of water. Next, the team will try to understand how the compounds they saw in the plume relate to what’s actually embedded in the lunar regolith at the bottom of the permanently shadowed crater.
NASA discovers 'significant' amount of water on moon -- Washington Post
NASA sees "significant quantities" of water on the moon -- Ars technica
Splash! NASA moon strikes found significant water -- AP
Water Found on Moon, Scientists Say -- New York Times
NASA Moon Crash Found 'Significant Amount' of Water -- FOX News
Water found on Moon after Nasa 'bombing' mission -- The Telegraph
Rosetta Probe Makes Final Earth Flyby As It Sling-Shots Towards Speeding Comet
From The Daily Mail:
This spectacular image of our home planet was captured by Europe's Rosetta probe as it made its third and final flyby of Earth.
The outline of Antarctica is visible under the clouds in the illuminated crescent. Pack ice in front of the coastline caused the very bright spots on the image.
The Earth image was taken by the-board camera OSIRIS yesterday, from a distance of 393,000 miles.
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